Druk is a study in extremes, featuring the narrowest, widest, and heaviest typefaces in the Commercial Type library to date. Starting from Medium and going up to Super, Druk is uncompromisingly bold.

Druk was consciously designed without a normal width, nor lighter than medium weights. Berton Hasebe, the designer, wanted to avoid the compromises of forcing the typeface away from its essence for more general-purpose usage. Druk is conceived to offer new possibilities to graphic designers that other typefaces can’t. Its initial use as a companion to Neue Haas Grotesk demonstrates that it works equally well with any number of other sans serifs, including Atlas, Graphik and Marr Sans. Its three widths can be mixed together for bold and expressive typographic treatments, and its text versions allow for use at very small sizes, giving structure and visual interest to typography at all scales.

The sans serif letterform of the 19th century evolved in many different ways by the end of the century. The first condensed forms, found in the 1830s in Britain, quickly spread all across Europe. Some of the most interesting examples were found in Germany and Switzerland.

Often flat-sided, these Continental condensed sans serifs allow very tight setting, which was popular for headlines. These later became a staple of sixties headline typography in magazines such as Twen, the German style magazine art directed by the legendary Willy Fleckhaus in the 1960s, which is still an enduring influence on editorial design to this day. Berton Hasebe created Druk Cyrillic for Richard Turley at Bloomberg Businessweek, adapting the attitude and roughness of these old condensed sans serifs for contemporary use. After using a staple diet of Neue Haas Grotesk and Publico for two years, they wanted to add a typeface that would look both exciting and distinctive in and of itself. The result was Druk Cyrillic, which went on to play a major role in many of their iconic covers.

Berton Hasebe, a type designer, studied in Los Angeles, earning a bachelor of arts degree from the Otis College of Art and Design (2005). He has also completed the Type & Media M.A. program at the Royal Academy of Art in the Hague. During his student years, Hasebe created the typeface Alda, which was published by Emigre and drew the attention of the juries of the Type Directors Club in New York and Tokyo in 2008. He worked for Commercial Type in 2008-2013, where he helped develop typefaces for Bloomberg Businessweek, The New York Times and Wallpaper*. Since 2013 he has been working independently. He teaches typography at the Parsons School of Design in New York and the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, Pa. Since 2016, he has also taught in the Type@Cooper program. His work has been singled out for praise by ATypl conferences and at the graphic-design biennial in Brno. In 2012, he was among those cited by the journal Print on its annual list of new visual artists.

Ilya Ruderman, a type and graphic designer and teacher, lives and works in Moscow. He is a graduate of the Moscow State University of the Printing Arts (2002), where his graduation project was done under the supervision of Alexander Tarbeev. He has a MA degree in type design from the Type & Media program at the Royal Academy of Art in the Hague (2005). After completing the program, he returned to Moscow, where he has collaborated for a number of media: Kommersant, Afisha, Moskovskiye Novosti, Bolshoi Gorod and Men’s Health Russia. In 2005-2007 he was art director for Afisha’s city guidebooks, following which he was art director for RIA-Novosti, a news agency, for several years. Since 2007 he has also supervised the curriculum in type and typography at the British Higher School of Art and Design in Moscow. He has been very active as a consultant on Cyrillic since 2008. In 2014 he founded CSTM Fonts with Yury Ostromentsky.

Yury Ostromentsky is a type and graphic designer. He is a graduate of the Moscow State University of the Printing Arts (2002), where his graduation project was done under the supervision of Alexander Tarbeev. He has worked as a designer and art director for publishers and design studios. From 2004 to 2012, he served as art director of the magazine Bolshoi Gorod (Big City), for which he created several display typefaces as well as several original typefaces and Cyrillic versions of Latin fonts in collaboration with Ilya Ruderman. His typefaces were honored at the Contemporary Cyrillic 2009 and 2014 competitions. In 2004 he and Ruderman, Dmitri Yakovlev and Darya Yarzhambek created DailyType, a website. In March 2014, again with Ruderman, he founded CSTM Fonts.

Based in New York and London, Commercial Type is a joint venture between Paul Barnes and Christian Schwartz, who have collaborated since 2004 on various typeface projects, most notably the award winning Guardian Egyptian. The company publishes retail fonts developed by Barnes and Schwartz, their staff, and outside collaborators, and also represents the two and their team when they work together on type design projects. Following the redesign of The Guardian, the team headed by Mark Porter, including Barnes and Schwartz, was awarded the coveted Black Pencil by the D&AD. The team was also nominated for the Design Museum’s “Designer of the Year” prize. In September 2006, Barnes and Schwartz were named two of the 40 most influential designers under 40 in Wallpaper*.